This startup has a radical way to save businesses time on menial office tasks

Getting freelance help for business projects often feels more
like dating than time-saving.

Businesses have to post an attractive task, pick a
freelancer to do it (based on little information) and then hope
it's a good match and that the work comes back at a decent
quality.

If it's bad, they move onto the next one.

If they find the "one" who is a good fit, they will
generally take the freelancer off the market to help work
exclusively.

After all, that's how Konsus
is building its own business to help workers save time by using
freelancers. They've been posting job listings, and then poaching
the ones who do the best work.

"This work of going around of platforms saying 'I'm John from
Russia and I'm great at PowerPoint, so please hire me' isn't a
nice thing. And then people are not nice to you. You're going to
get fired daily," said cofounder and CEO Fredrik Thomassen.

Instead, Konsus flips the model on its head. Businesses
send a chat message or an email to ask for help on a
project, and a project manager immediately delivers a quote and
splits up the tasks among freelancers. No begging, dating, or
firing on either side. And starting Thursday, the company is also
launching an integration with Slack, so
requesting a spiced up PowerPoint will be as easy as
chatting with a coworker.

A problem with no solution for many workers

Thomassen learned the value of outsourcing some easy tasks from
his days as a consultant. At McKinsey, they had a staff of
freelancers that could help them take care of some of the
essential but non-core tasks of doing their jobs overnight. A
PowerPoint presentation could be sent off at the end of the day
and a formatted version would be back in his inbox in the
morning.

Leaving to build his own company, Thomassen soon realized that
his days spent building a company meant nights handling excel
spreadsheets and creating investor presentations.

After messing around trying to hire folks on other platforms, he
built his own network of freelancers, and soon realized his
friends were looking for an affordable solution to cut down on
office work too.

The problem is the freelancer market has been so broken,
Thomassen said.

Sondre Rasch and Fredrik
Thomassen, cofounders of Konsus, pose in front of the Y
Combinator logoKonsus

Meeting with his college friend Sondre Rasch for lunch in the
parliament of Norway, where Rasch was working as a policy
advisor, the pair realized that there was a larger need for quick
and easy but quality work that benefited both the freelancer and
business.

There were plenty of companies to get freelance labor, like Task
Rabbit, or longer engineering work, like Gigster. But their idea
for Konsus was to create a solution that any business can tap
into and have round the clock support. Negotiating a contract for
data entry shouldn't take longer than the time it would take to
just enter it.

The company launched in Norway in August 2015 and has already
signed up customers ranging from major enterprise clients like
Telenord to small 10 person businesses looking for some extra
help. The pair joined the prestigious Y Combinator
accelerator in January 2016 to introduce Konsus to the US after
seeing 10% week-over-week growth after its launch. And unlike
most startups that are eight months old, the pair claim it's
already profitable.

"The problem we're solving is not just finding the freelancer,
but also getting it done," Rasch said.

How Konsus works

To save businesses time, Konsus pre-screens and vets the
freelancers to work on its platform, making it easy to find help
immediately and not go through the back-and-forth hiring phase.
For freelancers, it's a big boost to have a constant
stream of tasks without having to invest time into responding and
competing for job postings.

The company narrows down its freelance help to 10 core
competencies, ranging from website and logo design to data entry.
After spending hours scanning freelancer forums all over the web,
these tasks accounted for 60% of contract volume, Thomassen
said.

When a business chats Konsus a request, a project manager quotes
the company a price and puts it into a pool of available tasks.
The project manager will be someone from your country, but the
task could be sent to freelancers around the world based on their
skill set and availability.

"The language barrier can be high when working with freelancers
globally. Communication difficulties do arise and we bridge that
gap by having that project manager who you do have a common
language with and who you can hold responsible, " Rasch
said.

The project manager is also in charge of asking questions and
breaking down the tasks into bits for freelancers.

While normally a business would have to post a task like a new
website piece by piece on a freelance site, Konsus handles
breaking it down and assembling the finished product. Logo design
is dispatched to one specialist while copy writing is sent to
another. The product manager then makes sure the quality is high
and meets the standards before sending it back to the business —
and all of this happens instantly since it's staffed around the
clock.

"What we find is that very few real tasks when
you think about it in the business world revolves around one very
well-specified single task," Thomasssen said. "I
think we've almost never seen a task which is simply one siloed
specialized task that we can just complete directly."

Businesses can buy a package of 100 hours at a rate of $19/hour.
For one-off tasks, it's bumped to $29/hour. The company doesn't
vary pricing based on the freelancer or time of day or turnaround
time. It's designed to be transparent and equal.

For the founders, making Konsus affordable comes at a peak time
when e-labor or freelance work is on the rise, but there hasn't
been any disruption to the traditional marketplace of posting job
listings.

Previously contract work meant you were a beggar for work.

"Previously contract work meant you were a beggar for work. Maybe
sometimes people would be nice to you and give you some task. But
now the power relationship is totally changing around, and if
you're talented, you can tap into a service like Konsus and get
work whenever you want," Thomassen said.

By cutting down on the time freelancers spend having to search,
they can do work that's fitted to their skill set around the
clock and increase profits just based on volume alone.

"Whether you're a single mom in the Philippines or a failed
writer in Scandinavia living in the mountains, you can just open
up your computer at any moment to start working on what you're
good at and get paid the value of that product," Rasch said. "We
think that kind of flexibility for those that want is better, and
that's the future of work."